42 U.S.C. § 300g–8 — Operator certification

(a) Guidelines Within 30 months of August 6, 1996, working with the states, the Administrator must publish guidelines in the Federal Register — after notice and a chance for public comment from interested people, including states and water systems — setting minimum standards for certifying, and recertifying, operators of community and nontransient noncommunity public water systems. These guidelines must account for existing state programs, how complex a system is, and other factors, so that states and systems of different sizes get an effective program at a reasonable cost. (b) State programs Starting 2 years after the Administrator publishes the (a) guidelines, the Administrator must withhold 20 percent of the funds a state would otherwise get under section 300j–12, unless the state has adopted and is running an operator-certification program for community and nontransient noncommunity systems that either meets the (a) guidelines, or was submitted under (c) and hasn't been disapproved. (c) Existing programs A state that already has primary enforcement responsibility for water systems, or that already runs its own operator-certification program, can keep enforcing that existing program instead of following the (a) guidelines — as long as it submits the program to the Administrator within 18 months of the guidelines' publication, and unless the Administrator decides, within 9 months of that submission, that the program isn't substantially equivalent to the guidelines. In making that call, the Administrator must presume an existing state program is substantially equivalent, despite differences based on system size or source-water quality, as long as the state's program meets the guidelines' overall public-health goals. If the Administrator disapproves the program, the state can resubmit it, with fixes, within 6 months of getting the disapproval notice. (d) Expense reimbursement (1) The Administrator must reimburse the costs of training — including a reasonable per-diem for unsalaried operators — and certification, for people operating systems that serve 3,300 people or fewer and that must undergo training under this section. (2) This reimbursement comes through grants to states. Each state gets enough money to cover the reasonable cost of training all such operators in that state, as the Administrator determines, to the extent this section requires. A state must first use its grant to reimburse the training and certification costs of operators at systems serving 3,300 people or fewer. Once a state has reimbursed all of those costs, it can — after telling the Administrator — use any money left over from the grant for the other purposes section 300j–12 allows. (3) Congress authorized $30,000,000 per year for the Administrator to provide these reimbursement grants, for each of fiscal years 1997 through 2003. (4) If a given year's appropriation under (3) isn't enough to cover what (1) requires, the Administrator must, before making any other allocation or reservation, set aside the money needed from funds appropriated under section 300j–12(m) to cover the required training and certification reimbursement.